Kevin Carmony of Linspire/Freespire has announced that the first beta of Freespire has been released earlier than anticipated. Get it from the download page. According to Carmony, this release includes out-of-the-box support for proprietary formats such as .mp3 and WMV, plug-and-play support for Ati and nVIDIA cards without user intervention, Click-N-Run, and much more.

We all like to point to Firefox and OpenOffice.org as shining examples of FOSS, but where would Firefox be without the millions Netscape (and later AOL) poured into Mozilla, and where would OpenOffice be without the millions Sun has poured into it?

Novell, Red Hat, Sun, Linspire, and many other commercial companies need FOSS to get better, so we invest in it. If these companies are successful (other than Red Hat, there aren't too many examples of "profitable" Linux companies, or companies that have profitable Linux operations), they will be in a position to continue to support Linux and FOSS.

As with regular communities (cities), they thrive or die based on not only the people who live in those cities, but also the economic vitality of those communities. Most of us like living in places with healthy economies, because everything elevates and gets better (roads, schools, etc.). FOSS communities are no different. How nice do you think the roads and school would be in an economically depressed area? Or an area void of commerce? Linux is no different.

The key is that all these companies, for the most part, embrace the open nature of FOSS, so they are able to give back to it, without taking anything away from it that harms it.